Lois Andison’s multi-disciplinary practice displays a deep knowledge of transience. Through the use of sculpture, text, video and installation she conveys the complexity of time, systemic transformation and what it is that constitutes to be female in the
canon of contemporary art history. Her work interrogates the hegemony of one of the many strains of history that views her as something extraneous to the patrilineal genetic line. This is a line Andison habitually steps across through her gestural, performative sculptures, her use of wordplay and through her afterworks.

A recurring motif in her kinetic sculptures is that of orbiting. This concept is extrapolated into word play that draws from the cycles of both the moon and the sun. The idea of time here is something which should not be thought of as linear but as a series of sequences running in synergy, through different zones of occurrence. It alludes to a more mindful and purposeful existence, one where we can move away from the ego, a traditionally male point of failure, and towards a more expanded sense of existence - a zone located in the inverse of the ego, a space of multiplicity that escapes framing by the masculine and allows for the conception of a third space, one which evolves from a history which evidently must change.

Her video work complements the noble simplicity and refinement of her sculptural work and bears the same depth in theoretical richness. Taking on the tradition of time, duration and the predominantly male-dominated area of impressionist painting, which sought to transfer to the canvas the neurological process the camera could not capture, Adison utilises technology, the same technology now synonymous with a culture obsessed with the documentation of the transient velocity, intensity and speed, and uses the gaze of the lens to conveys the movement a year - not a snapshot. Elsewhere in her moving images we encounter the performance of futility of the search for total control, a futility again that seems to allude the men at the helm of capitalism’s immaterial and abstract flows - like water flowing through the teeth of a comb, theunpredictability of financial black swans is something that cannot be controlled, though, and leads us to the conclusion that it is only what is outside of chance, our choices, that we can control.

To reiterate a comparison made in the catalogue of one of her exhibitions, Lois Anderson’s work reveals the potential for empathy between engineering and aesthetics. Engineering in this sense is not just the design and physics of industry, but the re-harnessing of the development of what is considered natural in reigning biological norms. Engineering must take into account the injustices that take place in the name of a so-called natural order. Adison’s work is an aestheticising of this kind of causal creation - developing works that offer us epistemic enquiry as to what we are in the nexus of ideological infrastructures, and if there is room for us to act as
collective agents towards our own determined trajectories

A library within a library, Artexte’s exhibition space is transformed into a reading room. Book, lamp, chair: An exhibited library presents publications that document the practices of artists participating in MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image 2017. In a familiar setting that encourages exploration, documentation from Artexte’s collection is shown in conjunction with a print project by conceptual artist Micah Lexier (Canada) and a video program including works by David Hartt (Canada), Nelson Henricks (Canada), Valérie Mréjen (France), and Erin Shirreff (United States). The exhibition is an open invitation to consider the documentation of artistic practices, the multiple ways available for reading and interpreting images, and the role of the library as a space to rest, see, and learn.

Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) is interested in the history of postwar Lebanon, particularly media coverage of political conflicts. In the works exhibited, he blends his country’s official history with its contingent histories. His piece Saida June 6, 1982 (2002–13) addresses the issues of writing a collective memory and of producing images in a time of conflict. Through the compilation of diverse media archives — television, radio, and press photography — and his personal notes written when he was a teenager, Zaatari brings us back to the moment when Israel invaded his hometown in 1982. The video installation Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) evokes a different episode of this invasion. Taking inspiration from Letters to a German Friend (1943–45) by Albert Camus, Zaatari reflects on the acts of compassion and resistance performed by an Israeli pilot who refused to bomb a public school in Saida.

Akram Zaatari (1966) is a Lebanese video artist, photographer, and curator who lives and works in Beirut. Through the practice of researching and studying existing documents, he reflects, in his films and photographs, on the shifting nature of borders and the production and circulation of images in the context of the current political divisions in the Middle East. His work is exhibited widely. Recent shows include Against Photography, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (2017); This Day at Ten, Kunsthaus Zurich (2016); Unfolding, Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2015); Akram Zaatari, Salt (Istanbul, 2014); and Projects 100, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2013). He represented Lebanon at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and his work was in documenta 13 in 2012. His work is featured in international collections such as the Walker Art Center and Centre Georges-Pompidou. He is represented by the Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg, Beirut), the Thomas Dane Gallery (London), and Kurimanzutto 124 (Mexico City).

It is the first exhibition of the artist in Quebec.
MOMENTA 2017

Mix and Match Tour

A Mix and Match Tour combining a guided tour of the exhibitions at Dazibao and Occurrence takes place on September 23 at 3pm.

DAZIBAO PRIZE

Since 2007, the Dazibao Prize has been awarded to an artist participating in MOMENTA whose work stands out for its conceptual rigour, its relevance, and its contribution to image-based practices. The recipient of the prize is invited to produce a book for Dazibao’s Les portables series, which is launched at the following edition of the biennale at the same time as the announcement of that edition’s recipient. Dedicated exclusively to one artist’s project, each title in this series acts as a travelling exhibition with unlimited circulation. This year, the Dazibao Prize event takes place on October 13, upon invitation, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Kim Kielhofner READING PATTERNS

Sep 6 - Oct 14, 2017

Kim Kielhofner has become a collector of the residues of everyday life and images from her surroundings.

With READING PATTERNS, the Montreal artist Kim Kielhofner presents three works that explore how an individual’s interiority, and implicitly their entire subjectivity, encounters the outside world. To achieve this, Kielhofner has become a collector of the residues of everyday life and images from her surroundings, in the process amassing, as she herself expresses it so well, a storehouse of human events. This personal archive, defying all temporality, attends to its anachronism with care so that a narrative form emerges which invites viewers to become a part of the story, a part of what they are being told. The images stored up by the artist, often shown to the viewer simultaneously and sometimes appearing in quick succession, guide viewers as they interrogate their relations with the other, to the self and to the notion of individuality. Although Kielhofner’s work appears at first to be based on an understanding of the other through analysis and repetition of their gestures, in fact it reveals the entire process whereby the self is constructed through the analysis of the other. By multiplying the levels on which it is read, and its repetitions, analogies and intersections of senses or visual elements, Kielhofner’s work searches for a common motif.

Thus, using an approach that at first glance appears intimist, the artist addresses sensitive social issues by questioning the implications, both philosophical and psychological, and even political, of the personal archive. In the very act of collecting can be seen the potential to develop critical thinking around cultural identity, because every choice — and every omission also — opens onto new narratives and makes it possible to revisit history.

In READING PATTERNS TOGETHER, two strangers cross paths around a mysterious package and try to shine light on the ties that bind them. The protagonists are seen in an undefined space where found footage is shown alongside new images, which sometimes resemble recreations or performances for the camera. By multiplying the points of view and interchanging roles, this ambiguous world offers a comparison between the viewer’s entirely individual — inner — experience of reading and the experience of the cinema that is rather external. Through a kind of ubiquity of female presence in the cinema and by blurring the question of who is watching whom, the definition of the self is also compared with the adulation of the other. This work joins collage with images of actresses and women filmmakers, such as Barbara Loden, who made Wanda in 1970, and Juliet Berto, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s and Jacques Rivette’s favourite actresses who also made several films, including Neige (Snow) in 1981.

TO READ IN A BLACK ROOM and THIRD READING extends the ideas explored in READING PATTERNS TOGETHER. Barbara Loden’s painted nails in Wanda (1970), the use of candies for transitions in Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and the transformative diamonds in Duelle (1976), both by Jacques Rivette, create a succession of symbols which demonstrate the way in which female presence is necessary to narrative development. And yet it is only in the interstice and the highly subjective parallel space they call forth that the work develops, as if it was a matter of performing the act of looking, of testing the act of creating. In fact, in THIRD READING, it seems even thecollection of this enigmatic feminine figure slips towards the creation of an alter ego who might prove to be a metaphor for the creative process itself.

F.C.

PROGRAMME

(starts on the hour and the half hour)

READING PATTERNS TOGETHER (2016) — 8 min. 53 sec.

TO READ IN A BLACK ROOM (2017) — 7 min. 50 sec.

THIRD READING (2017) — 11 min. 41 sec.
Kim Kielhofner completed a master’s degree in fine arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England in 2010, following a bachelor of fine arts degree at Concordia University in 2007. She is known for her videos and drawings which often take the form of books. Her work has been shown in numerous international festivals; recently, VOX (Montréal, 2015) and Sporobole (Sherbrooke, 2017) have mounted solo exhibitions devoted to her. She won the Hnatyshyn Foundation Charles Patcher Prize (for emerging artists) in 2013 and was part of the exhibition New Contemporaries: In the Presence, presented at S1 Artspace/Site Gallery, Sheffield and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2011).

READING PATTERNS was first presented in the London iteration of Pont/Bridge, a continuous partnership between LUX et Dazibao supported by the British Council in Canada and the Québec Government in the context of the Cultural Cooperation Québec-British Council.

As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present L’OFFRE.

How loaded is a gift? Through this age-old practice of exchange, we are confronted by a range of emotions and questions that have become even more complicated in modern life, which is heavily shaped by the marketplace. Is it really just the thought that counts? As the giver of a gift, a deluge of concerns comes into play, such as what is appropriate, what is ‘too much,’ or what is actually useful to the recipient. For the receiver there is also a sense of discomfort linked with indebtedness or the urgency of a reciprocal gesture. But there can also exist a sense of selflessness and joy in giving, as well as a gracious and loving acceptance that is part of the transaction. Gift exchange creates a bond between people, where gifts or, more precisely, the spirit of the gift continues to circulate.

In his much beloved 1979 book The Gift, Lewis Hyde discusses, at length, the idea of the artist’s gift, which when manifested in a work of art can act “as an agent of transformation.” It is at this moment that the artist’s gift comes into being, and it is with this in mind that L’OFFRE is presented.

This exhibition features the work of artists who are deeply engaged with the concept of the ‘gift’ and its attendant links with notions of exchange, reciprocity, value, labour, trace, ritual, gratitude, altruism, obligation, generosity, and connection. Painting, photo, video, sculpture, and even song are all part of L’OFFRE.

Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran is pleased to announce a new collaboration with David Elliott with a new exhibition entitled Million Dollar Bash featuring a series of large-scale paintings and recent collages to be held in the gallery’s second exhibition room.

One of the principal Canadian painters associated with the late seventies and early eighties return to figuration, Elliott is a self- prescribed postmodern collagist with strong affinities for nineteenth-century symbolism and twentieth-century metaphysical painting. Elliott chooses and arranges images with both rigor and vitality that serve to evoke feelings of Romanticism from ages past. For Elliott, the deliberate choosing of imagery is just as important as the way in which said images are arranged on the canvas. Inspired by such works as the assemblage pieces of American artist Joseph Cornell and the counterculture aesthetic of the 1960’s and 70’s, David Elliott sees the world in pieces, and in turn desires to patch together its various elements as one onto the canvas – a space that he once referred to as his “metaphysical spatial container.”

Elliott’s imagery is characterized by its exuberance and surprising juxtapositions. Throughout his career, collage has served as the point of departure for his large, brightly coloured canvases. Since 2006, his collage studies have evolved into 3-dimensional maquettes and miniature paper and cardboard theatres – all full of rich poetic resonance. In Million Dollar Bash, Elliott balances innocence with a sense of dread in a series of vignettes that evoke earlier spirits of silent cinema and early recorded popular music, yet simultaneously serve as testimonials to our own complicated times. Most of these collage boxes were done this past winter, with figures rather than still life still dominating the frame. While David Elliott’s earlier collages both compressed and combined various sources to create a mobile, unknowable sense of time and place, we now see distinct late 19th and early 20th century imagery in his work. Men and women appear as early venture capitalists, debutantes, burlesque performers, or silent film stars. These small scenes in turn serve to approach that same theatrical balance between innocence and calamity that renders early cinema and early-recorded music so compelling. Million Dollar Bash, in reference to a Dylan & the Band’s 1967 song of the same title, is a good metaphor for what Elliott is seeking in his work; a place full of excitement, promise, and dread – even if we are sitting alone in our room. It’s that on-going circus that shuffles around inside our head and we can never be sure if it is real or a dream.

Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran is pleased to present Get rid of the fabric softener, Dominique Pétrin’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The artist will present a new body of work structured around the notion of collective work and social structures organized during labour. Known for her screen-printing practice and her use of hand-printed paper, which is cut out and then glued together, Dominique Pétrin creates immersive, monumental and for the most part, ephemeral works. Always rigorously conceived in relation to the architecture of the site, her installations are freely inspired by the frescoes of Pompeii, the history of ornament and Internet culture.

For her exhibition at the gallery, Pétrin will show a series of “quilts” that she has been working on for almost two years. Her recent reflections on the production of art objects have led her to rethink the question of traditional techniques, both from a practical and formal perspective. For her, the physical work required to carry out her installations can be considered as an artistic performance in its own right. From a formal viewpoint, the artist has striven to get rid of the ornamental, burlesque and trompe-l’œil, to simply put forth the silent force of the work. In going to the heart of her practice, Pétrin seeks to strip away all artifices in order to contemplate and lay bare the very essence of her approach.

The choice of the quilt is obviously not trivial. The technique the artist developed is very close to the one traditionally used for quilting, which basically consists of an assemblage of colourful motives determined by a selected geometry. The quilt also evokes a feminine domestic imaginary, with its codes, its histories, and political messages. Carried out during pivotal moments in a woman’s life, these works and the time dedicated to them made it possible to transmit knowledge between women of various generations within a single household or community. For this series of works, Pétrin decided to work with a group of women and, for several months, they cut out, and assembled the quilts. The repeated ancestral gestures are here sublimated, thus allowing one to understand these artisanal practices as historical testimonies and as agents of social cohesion within a community or a family.

This exhibition acts a counterpoint to the idea of decisive moment, an invitation to consider duration as a key component of the photographic act. Four artists present projects in which the moment is extended – through investigations into generational time (Velibor Božović), urban time (Jinyoung Kim), geological time (Thomas Kneubühler), and archival time (David K. Ross).

For the 2017 edition, MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image will probe the concept of photographic evidence in all its guises. The event will feature works that question the status of the photograph as a recording of the real, and will examine the fantastical and sublimated character of reality. Viewers will be encouraged to take a critical stance toward the testimonial value of lens-based images, be they still or moving. Their images speak of the world in different ways, but they systematically sidestep the real.

VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine and Galerie de l’UQAM form the headquarters of this 15th edition, presenting a group exhibition comprised of woks by 23 artists.

In order to distinguish what is proper to objects from that which pertains to interpretation, illusion, recognition, or error, Erin Shirreff (Canada) generates visual displays that probe the distance between the object and its photographic representation. In the double projection Concrete Buildings (2013–16), the artist focuses on two prototype buildings that the American artist Donald Judd designed and built in Marfa, Texas. The video installation presents long-duration montages composed from photographs and short videos. With this piece Shirreff turns Judd’s minimalist structures into emblematic monuments through a persistent gaze inflected with tenderness. She challenges our relationship with the image by foregrounding the ways in which images enlighten us and instil doubt in our minds.

For its 15th edition, MOMENTA has joined forces with curator Ami Barak, who has developed an outstanding program on the theme What Does the Image Stand For? MOMENTA explores the concept of photographic and videographic evidence for the prosecution, whether images are still or in motion, raising the question of images as avatars, and focusing on the fantastical and sublimated aspects of the reality that they convey.

Every year since 1981, a report titled L’état du monde has been published summarizing the economic and geopolitical state of the world. This year, the topical themes it delves into include the end of communism, globalization and the digital revolution. In a fast-changing international landscape, continually shaped by economic power relationships and geopolitical issues that entail new challenges, the question of power seems more opaque than ever. Who is governing now? That is a complex question addressed in 2017 in the report cited, and one which is regularly tackled by artists producing works that are receptive to the world in which they operate. If art as a barometer of a society is a well-established trope, it is because artists’ interest in creating images that reflect the state of the world has been a recurring reality throughout the history of art. Relevant works by artists who favour this approach have been acquired by the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain. In the first part of the exhibition, the pieces by Taryn Simon, Jean Arp, Robert Longo and Claude-Philippe Benoit ponder, each in their own way, the state of the world, its institutions, the economy and citizenship.

For the 2017 biennale, MOMENTA has joined forces with the renowned curator and art critic Ami Barak. Around the statement What Does the Image Stand For?, the theme he has selected provides an opportunity for artists and visitors alike to consider the question of the veracity of the image while inquiring into the subjectivity of photographic and videographic language. In keeping with its international vocation, this 15th edition is showcasing the work of 38 artists from 17 countries, who represent numerous ways of working with the image irrespective of generational concerns. We have devoted special attention to the practices of artists from diverse cultural communities, and to emerging practices. MOMENTA 2017 comprises three segments. The first, which corresponds to the central exhibition at our headquarters (HQ), focuses on the work of 23 artists and is being presented at two separate sites: Galerie de l’UQAM and VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine. The second component consists of 14 solo exhibitions surrounding the HQ. And the third is a document exhibition located at Artexte.